Don Cardi, Don Cardi, Don Cardi.....What did I ever do to make you treat me so disrespectfully?

Funny stuff, DC. I was rolling

Well, we have to consider the handful of readers who may have missed the original.

Besides, writing these "updates" and getting to play God by putting to rest some of the unanswered questions with my personal opinions is the fun (and easy) part.

And finally, I'm just putting off the inevitable (and much more difficult):

Having to actually come up with an original plot.

Great job, but watch those run on sentences. Some are long and windy. I wonder why.

Way better then I thought it would be.
I enjoyed even this ruff draft.

Spend less time on Baseball and do more writing.
Outline your work first.

and most important, don't let your head get big.
You may just be penning a very popular piece of work!

A compliment from you, FS, is worth more than a thousand compliments from lawyers with their briefcases.

Run on sentences? I doubt it, but I'll go back and check. But imagine..... you correcting my writing.

And me with a big head? Sure. Why do you think I wrote the dam(n) thing in the first place?

The only place that this has a chance to be a "popular piece of work", though, is here.

As I've said already, with 5,000 words down, 195,000 to go, and no commercial possibilities, there's practically no chance that I'll ever finish this thing.

Plaw, this reminded me of a web site, Fan Fiction , where people submit stories such as yours. I found a section for the Godfather movie, here , but the book section didn't have Godfather. To be honest, I haven't even looked at any of the pieces on the site, so I'm not sure what level these people are writing at, but perhaps you'd be interested in posting your story there. There are probably better fan fiction sites out there, and I'm not sure how safe this one would be....I'm sure someone could easily claim your work as their own...but I thought you might at least like a look at it.

Thanks, Gina.

I took a quick look, and there's not much GF stuff there, and most of what is there isn't very good, IMO.

They're all pretty short pieces, so if you want a few chuckles read the one about Mama Corleone's pregnancy

I hadn't been to that site in a long time, so I couldn't remember what kind of stuff was there, but I think that explains it...

Guess I should've taken a look, first...

Excellent. Plaw, if you ever published a book, I'd preorder it!

I have copy and pasted your writing, plawrence, I will read it later as I do not spend alot of time on-line. I have read the first few lines of CHAPTER I, about Rocco Lampone. It is very interesting. You are a very good writer and I suggest you continue to write.

Plaw, you are certainly much more qualified to write a sequel than Winegardner. Keep up the good work. One word of advice: do not spend any pages on Lucy's vagina or Johnny Fontane's penis. But I guess you are a man who knows that without being told.

I am waiting for Chapter 3.

I have just finished reading CHAPTER I and CHAPTER II. I have not read Mark Winegardner's The Godfather Returns, so I can't compare the two, but your sequel of The Godfather is very interesting to read. I am waiting for CHAPTER III also.

Thanks for all the kind words, guys.

Let's finish Chapter 2 first, before we start Chapter 3, Peter. Don't you want to know the whole story of what really happened the night that Hyman Roth and Fredo tried to have Michael killed?

Of course, I just excited about CHAPTER III.

Your writing has inspired me to write a sequel to The Godfather, too, plawrence.

I've been called a lot of names ... but Weingardner! That's a low blow

For my part, I'm thinking about writing a book in the style of Puzo, as a tribute to his great literary genius. I'm currently studying some detailed textbooks on female genital anatomy for this very purpose.

pl, I'm truly enjoying both your story and yuor style of writing. I am surprised at Michael opening up, but I agree that if it were to be with anyone, it would be Tom. He's really all that's left of the old days.

As for Connie accepting Michael's version of Fredo's death, I have to believe that she would have. She recently lost her mother and has agreed to dump the husband and come home. She has finally found peace as Michael's caretaker and surrogate mother to Mary and Anthony. She would have to turn her back on all that, and I find it difficult to believe that she would. I think that she would prefer to believe what she needs to believe in order to survive.

PLAW! WE WANT MORE

Meet Edwin Throop. I think you'll be able to guess what's gonna happen next......

Chaper 2 (continued)

Doctor and Professor Edwin Throop, Assistant Chairman of the Mathematics Department at Stanford University, had never been to Las Vegas before despite the proximity of the state of California to Nevada.

Thirty-six years old, short, thin, bespectacled, and as average looking as a man could possibly be, there was absolutely no chance that he could ever stand out in a crowd, which was exactly how he wanted it, considering his plan to break the bank at the Tropicalla Hotel and Casino.

All of his life Professor Throop had been fascinated by (and displayed nothing less than a genius for) numbers. By the time he had entered the first grade of the run-down public school in the rural California town in which he had grown up, he had memorized the multiplication tables and taught himself long division, while his classmates still wrestled with simple addition and subtraction. When he was eight years old and halfway through the third grade he had fully mastered both elementary and intermediate algebra, and in his freshman year of High School was invited to, and regularly attended, the faculty meetings of the Mathematics Department, where he explained to his own teachers some of the advanced concepts and original theories he was working on.

He cared little for physical activity or sports, and displayed no interest whatsoever in members of the opposite sex or in learning any of the social graces of his time, fully concentrating instead on his studies. With the help of a full scholarship, made necessary by the fact that his family had always been poor, he attended College and Graduate School at Stanford, completing both a Masters Degree and Doctorate in Mathematics in under two years, culminating in the publication of his doctoral thesis in the leading mathematics journal in the world and being translated into eleven languages.

He was then regarded, despite his youth, as one of the leading mathematicians in the world and was rewarded with an offer from Stanford to join the faculty and immediately assume the assistant chairmanship of the Mathematics Department.

Completely unprepared for a career in anything but the academic world, Dr. Throop gratefully accepted the offer, despite the fact that on the day he signed his contract he was faced with a harsh realization: A Mathematics Professor, even an Assistant Chairman of the department of a great and world-renowned university such as Stanford, made barely enough money to live.

Or to live, at least, in a style in which Throop had long ago decided that a man of his stature in the world was entitled to.

So Dr. Throop made a decision that would have a far reaching effect on the rest of his life: That he would begin to use his spare time to look for ways in which he could employ his great abilities and huge body of knowledge in the world of mathematics, translating them into two things that the world at large found to be considerably more valuable and useful: Dollars and cents.

And now, in a cheap hotel room located two blocks off Las Vegas Boulevard, already known as “The Strip”, Dr. Edwin Throop had reached the point where he had decided that his research and investigations had led him to one inevitable conclusion. He had decided that he, a Doctor and Professor of Mathematics, could use his considerable talents to make a huge amount of money as a professional player of the game of blackjack.

He had first studied the stock and markets, attempting to determine mathematically if there was a way in which the price movements of these various securities could be predicted with certainty, and he had decided that there weren’t. These markets were controlled by people, and people were just too unpredictable for his taste. Next, he had studied currency markets, trying to see if there was a way to make money from the minute fluctuations of the dollar as compared to various foreign currencies, and discovered that these fluctuations were often the result of outside events over which no one had any control.

And then he discovered gambling. It was impossible to win at roulette and craps, those games being the most popular at the time. Both were games in which the player had to bet on the outcome of either the roll of a pair of dice or the spin of a wooden wheel, and, when they guessed correctly, were paid at less than actual odds of the outcome which they were betting on. Also, he realized that both games were games of what he called “independent probability”, meaning that the dice themselves, or the wheel, had no memory. He learned that when the color black came up three times in a row in roulette, there were people who bet on black on the next spin, believing that black was now “hot”. And he wasn’t surprised to find out that there were an equal number of people anxious to bet on red, thinking that red was now “due”.

But the game of blackjack, or twenty-one, was different. It was a simple game. The player and the dealer each received two cards at the beginning of each hand. Each card had a point value, deuces through nines being worth two through nine points, tens and picture cards were worth ten points, and aces worth either one point or eleven, depending upon the wishes of the player.

The player received two cards, face up, at the start of each hand, and added together their point values. He could then choose take more cards, to “hit” as they called it in the casino, or not, to “stand”, stopping whenever he wished, the object of the game being to reach a total of twenty-one or less which was closer to twenty-one than the total of the dealer. But the game had two problems, which gave the dealer, or the “house”, an advantage:

First, while the player received his two cards face up, the dealer received one face down. So the player was forced to make their decisions without knowing the dealer’s total. And, if the player’s total ended up exceeding twenty-one, a “bust”, he lost automatically, regardless of the dealer’s total. It was this second factor that gave the house a small, but inexorable, built in advantage.

But Throop noticed something interesting about the game as he studied it further. Blackjack, was not a game of independent probability. As various cards were played from the deck and not used again until the deck was finished and re-shuffled, the odds of a player busting could change, and he could alter his decisions to hit or stand accordingly based on those cards remaining to be played

He realized, for example, that when the deck had been played halfway through and there were a disproportionate number of lower cards – twos, threes, and fours – remaining, the player could hit a total of, say, 15 or 16, with less of a chance of busting. And when there were more higher valued cards remaining – tens and picture cards – there were cases when it was better to stand on those totals of 15 or 16, leaving the higher valued cards for the dealer to possibly bust with.

Simply stated, Throop realized that all he had to do to beat the game of blackjack was to determine those situations in which the odds favored the player, and increase his bet from those times in which the odds favored the house.

Sure you still needed to be lucky. Having a four or 5% edge over the house was not very much good on a single bet, but over the long run – and Throop knew that the way a casino made their money was based on the long run – betting with the odds in your favor had to ultimately prove to be profitable.

He had proven his theories. First, developing a way in which to count the cars played and determining which ones were left in the deck to be played. Then, deciding in which situations he should bet more, and finally, with the help of five graduate students, the playing of tens of thousands of practice hands to test his reasoning nd methods.

Now he was ready. With a bankroll of $10,000, which represented his meager life savings of $5,000 as well as an additional $5,000 he had been able to borrow, Edwin Throop planned to make a fortune. He knew he’d have to start small, risking little at the beginning while he built his bankroll up, but in the long run he was convinced that the success of his plan was as certain as such a thing could be.

Leaving his room, he almost had a smile on his face as he began walking the three short blocks to the nearest casino.

Not sure if I like this section as much as the older ones. Your writing style seems a bit rushed. I also found that someone who was not interested in the opposite sex, etc., wouldn't necessarily be interested in financing an opulent lifestyle by counting cards.

It's still entertaining, and better than most of the books on today's best-seller list, but just not quite up to par with your first attempts.

Well, I have the guy figured as kind of a nerd; someone who figured that he couldn't form relationships with women on his own, but would need some "financial aid" to do it.

Anyway, here's more of Chapter 2, the long awaited scene in which Michael explains what really happened the night of the Tahoe assassination attempt, and who killed the shooters.

# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #

Michael and Tom began walking.

“Fredo never got over what happened the day that they tried to kill Pop.” Michael said.
“How he got out of the car and dropped his gun in panic while the shooters escaped. And then, when he was in Vegas, getting slapped around in public by that fucking Moe Greene. He wasn’t my equal and he knew it, and because he was my older brother, it always bothered him.”

“Enough to help try and have you killed?” Tom said. He was still having trouble with the idea that Fredo was anything more than a dupe in the Roth assassination plot.

“Yeah, enough even to try and have me killed” Michael replied quickly. “Let me tell you what really happened.

“Fredo met Johnny Ola in Beverly Hills.” Michael began. “It was no ‘accidental’ meeting; Roth set the whole thing up. I found out later that he knew Fredo was gonna be there from one of Moe Greene’s old pals who was somehow still working for us at the Tropicalla.”

“He worked my brother over real good, that Johnny Ola. He told Fredo that the family was losing respect, that the Rosatos were walking all over Pentangelli’s crew in New York and making us look bad. How Connie was embarrassing the family by the way she was acting, and how I couldn’t control her. And How Hyman Roth, one of Pop’s “old friends”, felt so badly for us.” Michael couldn’t resist letting a note of sarcasm drip into his voice.

“He told Fredo that of all of the friends of the family, all of the heads of the other families, felt everyone would be better off with me out of the picture.” Michael continued. “How I was nothing more than a ruthless killer who couldn’t be trusted. He told Fredo that the Commission had met secretly and decided that I had to go, and that afterwards they would all endorse Fredo as the new head of the family.”

“He said that we were being run out of New York, and that I was getting in over my head with the Vegas move…..that it was just a matter of time until we lost what little influence and power we had left. He told Fredo that that he was the only member of the family left who everyone felt that they could reason with, the only one with my father’s sense of fairness.”

“And Fredo bought that story?” Tom asked.

“All the way.” Michael answered. “He saw getting rid of me as a way to get the power that he’d always wanted and never had. He’d be even with Pop for ‘passing him over’, and even with me for being Pop’s choice even though I was his younger brother. So he agreed to Ola’s plan.”

“And the plan was….” Tom began.

“The plan was, of course, to assassinate me on the night of Anthony’s communion party. They figured that would be the perfect time to it. With all the guests around, and the governor’s security people, and the caterers and clean-up crew and everyone else, they thought it would be easy to sneak a couple of professionals onto the estate without anyone noticing.” Michael said.

“Somehow, Roth got to the guy who owned the company that supplied all the tables and linens for the party, and they had two extra guys with their weapons hidden inside their truck when they delivered all the stuff that morning. Must’ve cost that old bastard Roth plenty to set that up. Anyway, as soon as they had a chance, the two guys jumped out of the truck and hid in the woods until it was dark. Fredo had already given Ola a map of the property and a diagram of my house, and, of course, it was Fredo who snuck in and opened the drapes. As soon as they saw me inside, they opened fire. It was nothing but luck that prevented Kay and I from being killed.”

“One thing, though, Mike. Who killed the hit men?” Tom asked.

Michael chuckled. “That was the best part of the whole plan, and you’re not gonna believe it. The two guys we found in the ditch weren’t the hit men. They were two fresh dead bodies, smuggled onto the property in the truck with the hit men. Apparently they had been killed a day before the party, and kept on ice inside the linen truck. By the time the truck got onto the estate, they were almost frozen stiff, and would need ten or twelve hours to thaw out, perfect timing for when we were supposed to find them. I swear, I almost had to laugh when I heard this part. The two hit men dragged them into the woods, and when it came time for the shooting to start, they dragged them back and dumped them in the ditch first. Then, when the shooting stopped, they went back into the woods and walked along the shoreline of the lake for about two miles to a spot where Roth had a boat waiting for them. Of course, when we found the bodies in the ditch, we assumed that they were the shooters, and we stopped looking for anyone else. That made it very easy for the real shooters to escape.”

Tom whistled softly. “You’re right, Mikey. That story is unbelievable.

“Yeah” Michael said. “Fredo knew all along that it was supposed to be a hit. Roth was smart. He figured that the only way Fredo would go along with the plan was if it ended with me being killed. Fredo wouldn’t have played along any other way – he would’ve always been afraid that somehow I would find out what happened if I were left alive.”

“True enough” Tom Hagen said. "You left out one part, though, Mike. How did you figure all of this out?”

“I didn’t figure it out” Michael replied. “Fredo told the whole story himself. Last week. When he begged me to kill him because he didn’t have the nerve to do it himself.”

Hmmmmmm Plaw, I dunno.

You are not going to please the "Fredo didn't know" crowd (if you know what I mean."

And as for the bodies on ice, wouldn't Tom have had access to those bodies since that was the instant when Michael left him in charge?

Your idea is a good one, and picking it apart is what we do best, whether its Puzo, FFC or you. But keep it up!

I'm not sure I understand your question, DT.

When they found the bodies, they were all thawed out and everyone assumed that they were the hitmen. What's your question about Tom's access to the bodies?

As far as the Fredo didn't know" crowd goes, there are those who think he knew and those who think he didn't, so I'm not gonna be able to please everyone.

Interestingly, I was always part of the "didn't know" crowd, but I thought the revelation that he did know, and had asked Mike to kill him was actually quite dramatic, if I do say so myself.

Please feel free to pick it apart as much as you wish. I certainly don't want to be thought of as the second coming of Weingardner.

Plaw, I just meant that Tom would have had the chance to inspect the bodies, but you are right he would not have known they were thawed out. I like the whole idea of Fredo begging for his life, and the Johnny Ola meeting is pure genius.

You mean begging Mike to end his life.

i think it sounds plausible. i really can't find any reason as to why that story couldn't be true at all. it shows that fredo wasn't a complete idiot like he's made out to be sometimes, but it also shows that he wasn't really that smart either, which i think is the perfect description of fredo. it gives fredo a ruthlessness to kill his own brother, which some might say he didn't have, but it is possible given the
"i was passed over" scene. one thing that struck me was michael's swearing. that doesn't really seem to fit his cold, calculating character to me. but i have never read the novel, so if there michael uses language like that in the novel that doesn't show up on screen, then i apologize. i know you've admitted that writing dialogue isn't one of your strengths, so i don't mean to beat a dead horse. i certainly enjoy reading it and think you're doing a great job.

Note: If you've begun Chapter 2, I've made a small but significant change in the section about Edwin Throop.

Rather than have him begin playing at the Tropicalla, he starts off at a different, un-named casino. I'm gonna save the Tropicalla for later.

I'm sure everyone has a pretty good idea of what's coming, anyway .

I am enjoying these installments. You have to figure that Roth must've paid off someone to get on the estate, but I can't see him trusting Fredo to smuggle them in. One of the people hired for the day is far more plausible.

I like the fact that Tom is the only one he trusts. Just one continuity question, and I apologize if I'm mistaken, but aren't the Senate hearings long after the attempted hit?

Yeah.....Did I imply otherwise somewhere?

>>“He told Fredo that of all of the friends of the family, all of the heads of the other families, felt everyone would be better off with me out of the picture.” Michael continued. “How I was nothing more than a ruthless killer who couldn’t be trusted, and how I was hated for bringing all that heat down on everyone with the Senate hearings. He told Fredo that the Commission had met secretly and decided that I had to go, and that afterwards they would all endorse Fredo as the new head of the family.”<<

PL, That's what I was referring to. Italics are mine, btw.

My mistake, SB. Nice catch. Thanks.

Don Tomasso PMed me with a few more ideas about how Ola convinced Fredo, so I'm gonna redo part of that section.

You know, if Weingardner had vetted his book with a few of us, he would have had a better book.

Wait, let me rephrase that.

If Weingardner had vetted his book with a few of us, his book would not have been as bad as it was.

One of the advantages of working for an anal-retentive micro-manager for 8 years is that I'm a heck of a proof-reader!!